DAVID J Crawford (Letters, December 11) suggests that David Mundell appears to need an elephant and all the trappings. Crowd-funding should take place to raise the ante.

In the early 1950s I was taken, under protest, to visit London Zoo, in Regents Park. I went in a quite happy young girl and came out a very sad one. I had seen baby Brumas with her mother (Brumas was female) and that was the start of the unhappiness as I watched the mother pacing to-and-fro across her caged area and each time she got to the side she would bang her head on the bars, turn and pace back again; bang; to and fro; awful to watch her. Then we saw Sir Winston Churchill’s lion Rota. Donated to the zoo as a tame lion it was sad to see Rota in a cage looking bored. What about Guy the Gorilla, a magnificent animal, but again that "dead" look in his eyes? The only light relief was a compound of small monkeys who frisked about, climbing and jumping on each other. With my child’s eyes I watched the lady monkeys having a good time and a "man" monkey doing something odd with himself at the top of a tall tree trunk. Daddy wouldn’t say what. A woman came from the catering place with a tea-towel and flapped it at the naughty monkey who bared his teeth and screeched. There was also an elephant with a large structure on its back carrying several people. It looked rather miserable. Did I want a ride? No, I wanted to get out of that place as fast as possible.

Rather than bothering some poor elephant with a howdah and a mahout perhaps the "crowd-funded" cash could be put to renting a donkey and saddle for Mr Mundell and the rest donated to an animal sanctuary. Yes, David J Crawford was only joking but those memories from childhood are sad ones, of sad animals. Things haven’t changed very much.

Thelma Edwards,

Old Comrades Hall,

Hume, Kelso.